Browsing by Subject "Pedagogy"
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Item A graduate pedagogy course for mathematics teaching assistants(Texas Tech University, 2005-05) Froman, Jason D.; Harris, Gary; Dwyer, Jerry F.; Surles, JamesWe will describe a three semester-hour graduate level mathematics course which focuses on issues related to the teaching of mathematics at the college level and is taken by all new graduate students entering our program as graduate teaching assistants. We attempt to assess the overall impact of this course on students’ beliefs and practice related to the teaching of mathematics at the undergraduate level. We will do this by analysing survey data and information obtained from student records, student course evaluations, and interviews with students, faculty members, and administrators involved with the course from its inception in the fall of 2000 through the fall of 2004.Item A graduate pedagogy course for mathematics teaching assistants(2005-05) Froman, Jason D.; Harris, Gary; Dwyer, Jerry F.; Surles, JamesWe will describe a three semester-hour graduate level mathematics course which focuses on issues related to the teaching of mathematics at the college level and is taken by all new graduate students entering our program as graduate teaching assistants. We attempt to assess the overall impact of this course on students’ beliefs and practice related to the teaching of mathematics at the undergraduate level. We will do this by analysing survey data and information obtained from student records, student course evaluations, and interviews with students, faculty members, and administrators involved with the course from its inception in the fall of 2000 through the fall of 2004.Item A mixed methods study of the impacts and processes of a technology-mediated culturally relevant after-school program on urban elementary youth’s motivation to read(Texas Tech University, 2008-05) Deason, Chris; Maushak, NancyHeterogeneity is the norm in United States schools today. Children grow up within culturally situated environments that influence how they present themselves, interpret experiences, and understand the world around them. Because of this fact, cultural discontinuity can take place between schools, communities, and home cultures. A schism has grown between in-school and out-of-school culture for minority children. The unofficial curricula of urban music and hip-hop culture now compete with traditional learning settings such as schools, community centers, and churches. This study reported herein was grounded in culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) theory which theorized that minority children’s self-perception and value for school work would increase in a learning context that was collaborative, authentically assessed, and culturally sensitive. This current study employed the three elements of culturally relevant pedagogy theory in a 4-week hip-hop-based sound engineering class. Participants worked collaboratively to make an academic hip-hop music CD. Participants transformed science and math related books into rap songs. Digital audio workstation technology (DAW) was used to record the participants’ songs. The participants included eighty-seven 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grade participants at Oak Street Elementary School with a predominately Latino and African American population demographic. The Motivation to Read Profile (MRP) scales were administered on day one and the final day of this summer-based after school program. This instrument tapped participant’s self-perception of reading and value of reading. The 51 intervention participants and the 36 control group participants received the MRP scales. Three sources of qualitative data were used. These qualitative data were triangulated and converged with the results of their MRP means. The qualitative data sources included photo-elicited interviews, 10-second video clips, and a participant-learning journal. Using a paired samples t test, results indicated no statistically significant difference between the intervention groups’ pretest and their posttest scores on the MRP scales. Based on an independent samples t test, there was a statistically significant difference found between the intervention group’s posttest scores and the control group’s posttest scores in favor of the control group. However, the qualitative data indicated high levels of reading motivation. Participants claimed that the use of hip-hop culture during the intervention made reading fun, authentic, and collaborative.Item A player's introductory guide to the medieval vielle(2012-08) Green, Angela; Smith, Angela M.; Smith, Christopher; Martens, PeterThe vielle, or medieval fiddle, was one of the most popular instruments across Europe from about 1150 to 1450. The transmission of instrumental techniques and processes of modern historical performance practice has been transmitted primarily through face to face master-student interactions. This document is a manual for the player of bowed-string instruments to learn the introductory practices and processes in the modern performance of medieval music. Although applicable to almost any medieval bowed-string instrument, the ideas and exercises in this manual are aimed specifically toward the medieval fiddle, also called the vielle. Working through the exercises pertaining to areas of performance practice, such as song accompaniment, dance music, and instrumental arrangements of vocal works, over the course of this manual, the player should be able to learn new and different playing techniques on the instrument itself, attune the ear to new theoretical organization of melody, and embrace ideas for experimentation within the performance. After working through the document, it is expected that the player will be able to draw upon and expand any technique and process for his or her own personal artistic preferences for instrumental arrangement and presentation. Prior experience trained in classical performance in shoulder position is optimal for this manual, but this method presumes a player with little familiarity with the repertoire, with basic competency on bowed strings, some facility with rudiments of phrasing and bow position.Item Alternative Pedagogy : the One Room Schoolhouse and the Trojan Experiment(2012-05) Younse, Dustin Seth; Straubhaar, Joseph D.; Stone, Allucquère Rosanne“We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” -- Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs As we stand beyond the brink of the 21st Century, we are outside of the boundaries where the Ivory Tower approach to education is applicable, particularly in regards to the teaching of practical knowledge and the acquisition of necessary technical skills. We must also, however, address the very real scalability issues inherit in the One Room Schoolhouse approach, as the numbers of students who need education are not likely to shrink anytime soon. We are no longer apes on the savannah and we can no longer afford to act as robotic vessels in search of knowledge from academia’s font of knowledge. Technology is the future of our society and it is only growing in complexity. If we are to efficiently instruct our students in the ever-growing fields of general study and technology they face, we need to find a hybrid, or cyborg, approach, melding the ape and the robot.Item An anthropologist’s guide to the 21st century : a look at online and offline car culture in Central Texas(2010-05) Lopez, Joseph Todd; Stone, Allucquère Rosanne; Straubhaar, Joseph; Hartigan, John; Garrison, Andrew; McLeland, SusanThis dissertation looks at online and offline car culture in Central Texas. The online car culture observed is on Internet car forums and other Internet sources for car enthusiasts. Offline car culture deals with various types of car events around the central Texas area. These events include, but are not limited to, car shows, street races, and street meets. Cultural practices were observed in both types of environments and are analyzed by using hybridity theory, gender analysis and race analysis.Item Appeals to reason : negotiating rhetorical responsibility and dialectical constraints in church-state separation discourse(2014-05) Battistelli, Todd Joseph; Roberts-Miller, Patricia, 1959-This dissertation explores how argumentation theory can supplement models of responsible persuasion in rhetoric and writing studies. In particular, it demonstrates how reasoning as envisioned in the pragma-dialectical approach of argumentation can provide an alternative to exclusionary, unethical operations of reason. Despite longstanding work with models of argument from Aristotle to Stephen Toulmin, rhetoric and writing has paid little attention to the potential uses of dialectical argumentation theory. Such theory deserves greater consideration given its ability to meet the ethical demands voiced by rhetorical critiques of traditional ways of arguing. Critiques of reason demonstrate how the abstractions necessary for logical certainty exist in tension with the inherent ambiguity of human arguments. In attempting to strip away that ambiguity, some discussants unfairly exclude relevant details from others and may exclude entire populations who should be included in a fair deliberation. Goals of understanding and inclusion unite the variety of calls for new ways of arguing made in rhetoric and writing under titles of Rogerian, non-agonistic, listening, and invitational rhetorics. Nevertheless, as Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca describe, even as our arguments involve irresolvable ambiguities, they must also function as stable and coherent viewpoints such that our interlocutors can hold us accountable to agreement or disagreement. In this way, we responsibly argue questions of ethics, politics and law. Though no final resolution of ambiguity is possible in such questions, we can reason together for a better understanding of each other's positions and craft pragmatic policies to deal with our disagreements. In order to explore the disciplinary questions about the relationship between rhetoric and argumentation, the dissertation examines a series of case studies drawn from judicial disputes over church-state separation in the United States. In examining problematic rhetoric of these disputes, the dissertation builds an understanding of responsible reason informed by dialectical argumentation and demonstrates its utility for both critical and pedagogical applications.Item Bringing together theory and practice: The director as teacher in academic theatre(2009-05) Kelley, Sean Michael; Marks, Jonathan; Gelber, BillThis thesis is about bringing theatre theory and practice together through the director’s role as a teacher in academic theatre. Directing texts and programs were researched to provide the past and present views of the director as a teacher for academic theatre. The need for the director to perform as a teacher is established as well as using the production as a teaching tool. Numerous teaching opportunities are explored as well as methods for training the director as a teacher.Item COLLABORATIVE DESIGN PEDAGOGY: A NATURALISTIC INQUIRY OF ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION(2010-07-14) McPeek, Keith T.This research examines interviews conducted with more than a dozen authorities in architectural education on collaborative methodologies utilized in the design studio and identifies factors that inhibit and facilitate the incorporation of collaborative methods in the context of situated learning. This research explores the notion that the design and implementation of even the simplest architectural projects are almost exclusively collaborative endeavors requiring the expertise of a spectrum of individuals working together to achieve a singular goal. Each of these experts is highly trained in their respective areas, yet few are formally trained authorities in the skills of collaboration, including architects, individuals who are often put at the lead of design projects which include people of varied backgrounds, working styles and areas of expertise. Historically, the education of an architect has been a highly individualized pursuit, focused on the development of an individual skill set seldom requiring collaboration beyond that of student and professor. While this individualized, hands on approach to education has been highly revered by many, it often falls short of its potential and fails to recognize that the greatest design accomplishments of humankind have been the undertaking of collaborative enterprise. Furthermore, architecture students are being prepared in a manner that is contrary to the highly collaborative nature of the architectural practice they will enter without taking away from the inherent strengths of the traditional architectural education. Despite NAAB requirements for collaborative methods in the classroom, and an increasingly collaborative model of professional practice for architects, design education continues to trail woefully behind other disciplines such as business, law, nursing and medicine; each having long ago integrated collaborative study models into their curriculum. This research examines how collaborative methods including intradisciplinary, interdisciplinary and community based collaborations, can be further integrated as a formal part of the overall design curriculum and what factors facilitate and inhibit this inclusion.Item Cultivating community : socially responsible pedagogy in the devising process(2015-05) Thomas, Emily Aguilar; Schroeder-Arce, Roxanne; Dawson, Kathryn; González-López, GloriaAccording to the U.S. Department of Justice, statistics show that young people are experiencing sexual violence at the hands of adults and often do not tell anyone about their experiences ("Reporting of Sexual Violence Incidents"). Weaving research and practice in sexual violence and Applied Theatre, this case study explores the process of building community among participants while learning through and about these key content areas. Through a devising process that worked toward creating an original Applied Theatre program for young audiences, the researcher interrogates how enacting socially responsible pedagogy informed the process and nurtured a learning community. Enacting a critically-engaged pedagogy, this document invites artists, practitioners and pedagogues to consider how a feminist pedagogy might shape a socially-engaged art-making process and incite participants to take constructive action in their communities.Item Disciplining the popular : new institutions for Argentine music education as cultural systems(2010-05) O'Brien, Michael Seamus, 1978-; Moore, Robin D.; Erlmann, Veit; Slawek, Stephen; Keeler, Ward; Costa-Giomi, EugeniaThis dissertation focuses on a recent but growing movement in Argentina, state-sponsored formal institutions of popular music education. The musics taught in these schools – tango, jazz, and Argentine folk idioms – have historically been excluded from the country’s formal music education systems. Recent moves to standardize and legitimize these musics in this new institutional context raise questions of canon formation, pedagogical praxis, aesthetics and musical meaning that have implications far beyond the classrooms where they are implemented. I examine two of these schools based in and around the capital city of Buenos Aires: the Escuela de Música Popular de Avellaneda, and the Tango and Folklore department of the Conservatorio Superior de Música “Manuel de Falla.” I adopt an ethnographic approach that considers broad structural and policy issues of power distribution, state intervention, and cultural nationalism. I also examine how these structures play out in discourse and practice within and beyond the classroom, shaped by and in turn shaping students’ and teachers’ aesthetics, politics, and subject positions. I then analyze the output of several musical groups composed of current students and recent graduates of these programs, exploring the notion of an emerging institutional aesthetic and the extent to which these institutions act as homogenizing influences or engender creative divergence. Finally, applying Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of a field of cultural production, I question the extent to which this new “música popular” is truly popular, ultimately arguing that it occupies a sort of third space between mass culture and high culture, replicating some avant-garde assumptions about the role of art as anti-commercial, yet simultaneously embracing a symbolic economy that valorizes populist and subaltern identities and ideologies.Item Disrupting complacency in disadvantaged high school students : can principal and teacher pedagogical partnerships develop critical consciousness?(2010-08) Halx, Mark D.; Young, Michelle D.; Reyes, Pedro; Sharpe, J., Edwin R.; Gooden, Mark A.; De Lissovoy, NoahThis study is an exploration of the possibility of pedagogical partnership between low socioeconomic public high school principals and their classroom teachers for the purpose of advancing critical thinking skills and critical consciousness development in their students. This study will explore the viability of these partnerships through the perspectives of associate superintendents, principals, and teachers. The exploration will seek to determine the participants’ willingness to partner pedagogically, their readiness to advance critical thinking and critical consciousness development in their students, and their perception of district and state policies that might help or stand in the way of such development.Item Drama-based strategies in the elementary classroom : increasing social perspective-taking and problem-solving(2014-08) Combs, Austin Beasley-Rodgers; Cawthon, Stephanie W.Educational PsychologyItem Effects of intervention on undergraduate pre-service teachers in literacy educationWilliams, Alma ElizabethItem Enduring character : the problem with authenticity and the persistence of ethos(2013-12) Dieter, Eric Matthew, 1976-; Roberts-Miller, Patricia, 1959-This dissertation is interested in how people talk about character in a variety of public spheres. Specifically, it explores the tangled relationship between authenticity and ethos, or what is taken as the distinction between intrinsic and constructed character. While this dissertation does not presume to settle the question of authenticity’s actuality, it does discuss the ways authenticity cues in rhetorical acts continue to influence how “sincere character” in those acts is understood, even as audiences exhibit shrewdness in recognizing that character is a purposeful manifestation of the rhetor. The fundamental phenomenon this dissertation seeks to describe is how people, with better and worse success, negotiate the dissonance between valuing character as authentic and as presentation and representation. Character in this view is a much richer and more paradoxical concept than many discussions of the term admit. A too-diluted study of ethos limited strictly to pinpointing credibility in an argument makes it difficult to articulate why an exhibition of character sometimes works and sometimes flops. Ethos in its fullest complexity is, and is not, constructed by any single act; it is the consequence of narratives, both of those narratives, and also what we say about those narratives; it is something we know about a rhetor, at the same time that it comes from what the rhetor claims to know; it is, most important, an appeal to authenticity, even when we know ethos is discursively, kairotically, and socially constructed. This dissertation offers an expanded definition of ethos as rhetorical transactions that rhetors and audiences mutually negotiate in order to determine the extent to which all sides will have their rhetorical needs met, and the extent to which all sides can assent to the those needs. The dissertation, using the works of Wayne Booth, Kenneth Burke, and Chaïm Perelman as its primary theoretical structures, offers pedagogic implications for these mutual negotiations.Item Feminist performance pedagogy : theatre for youth and social justice(2013-05) Freeman, Emily Rachael; Alrutz, MeganThis thesis describes the use of feminist performance pedagogy in working toward a Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) practice that engages youth in social justice. Drawing on feminist and pedagogical theories, this document explores the processes of writing, rehearsing, and touring a new social justice play for youth called 'And Then Came Tango.' The qualitative study outlined in this MFA thesis uses feminist research methodologies to analyze the engagement of the playwright, the artistic team working on the production of 'And Then Came Tango,' and the second and third grade audiences that participated in the touring production and post-show workshops. The author weaves personal story throughout the document in order to create new meaning around the research experiences as well as to illustrate the personal dimensions of engaging in the struggle around LGBTQ injustice. The discussion invites future artists, educators, and activists to imagine how theory, aesthetics, artists, and communities collaborate in order to work toward socially just and interactive TYA.Item Intonation : the current state of affairs in the instruction of German ; The role of computer-assisted instruction in the German classroom : implications for today and the future(1988) Osborne, Deborah Rose Ogren; Chun, Dorothy M.; Donahue, Frank E.Item Learned by heart : pederastic reading and writing practices in Plato's Phaedrus(2016-05) Emison, Emily Ruth; Walker, Jeffrey, 1949-; Boyle, CaseyRather than reiterating the ways in which Phaedrus may be seen as Plato's positive reformulation of rhetoric, this paper focuses on reading the pederastic dynamic between the dialogue's interlocutors (and, by extension, it argues, between Plato and his contemporary audience as well as the text and future readers). Viewed thus, Phaedrus may be less invested than is generally supposed in settling whether rhetoric belongs more properly to the realm of doxa versus episteme or whether there is a clear and steadfast division between a "philosophical method" and a "rhetorical method" of teaching. Closer attention to Plato's pederastic language not only reunites the Phaedrus with its originally stated subject (i.e., the prospective benefits and detriments of the lover versus the nonlover, of mania versus sophrosune), it also clarifies the ways in which Plato contributed to contemporary debates over the Athenian paideia and highlights the ideal relationship between author, written word, and reader that his dialogues sought to foster. The paper begins with a brief description of pederastic practices and pederasty as an aristocratic phenomenon in 5th and 4th-century Athens, drawing on the constructionist approaches of Kenneth Dover and Michel Foucault. It then turns to the Phaedrus itself, reading the dialogue's dramatic setting, the intensifying erotic and poetic force of its three speeches, and its denouement with the so-called Myth of Theuth. The matter at hand is twofold: Why pederasty and how pederasty? Why does the dialogue include various references to rape, trickery, or force and how does Plato advocate particular reading and writing practices via the extended pederastic play of Phaedrus? These questions lead to an abbreviated survey of sophistic approaches to rhetorical education in 4th-century Athens, touching on the expanded sense of paideia and the rivalry between Plato and Isocrates. The paper's conclusion carries Phaedrus into the 21st-century classroom, ultimately proposing that learning Plato's dialogue, in more ways than one, may serve as a propaedeutic to rhetorical studies in the digital humanities and adjacent fields.Item Literature in first-year composition : a mixed methods analysis(2013-05) Odom, Stephanie Marie; Roberts-Miller, Patricia, 1959-This dissertation intervenes in a long-simmering debate about whether literature belongs in composition classes. Using a combination of empirical and textual methods, my scholarship proceeds inductively from analyzing artifacts of teaching, providing a better sense of what is happening in writing classrooms rather than simply speculating about it. In doing so, I revisit arguments made against using literature in composition and argue that the 21st century English department provides a different context within which literature and composition co-exist. One of the charges leveled against using literature to teach writing is that it is a "humanist" practice and therefore elitist. I trace the genealogy of this term and demonstrate the wide range of meanings this term has carried within the last century alone, arguing that those who raise the alarm against humanism need to clarify what they mean. Taking off from the humanistic concern with style, I analyze composition anthologies to see how the questions following the literary selections deal with stylistic concerns. By and large, I find that the literary selections reinforce the themes of the primarily nonfiction chapters, but are not presented as prose from which students can derive stylistic lesson. I then turn to analyzing syllabi, testing the accusation that those coming from literature backgrounds will teach literature in their composition classes at the expense of working on student writing. I find that literature specialists do not necessarily spend an excessive number of class days on literature, but do spend more class days on readings generally, with fewer days devoted to student writing than rhetoric specialists. Finally, I argue that the validity of student evaluations of teaching needs to be assessed by composition scholars because concerns specific to our courses--the small sizes, the frequent feedback teachers give students, the difficulty of assessing student work, and the fact that ours is a female dominated field--mean that research conducted by educational psychologists may not apply to composition. My research reinforces the idea that our course readings, assignments, pedagogy, and assessment methods should align purposively with each other.